05 Nov 2008

Lessons From Across the Pond

Edward Wright, a British Conservative, has an interesting piece about
the future direction of the Republican party here in the
U.S., full of suggestions that the party leadership would do well to
take to heart. There are many parallels between the defeat of the
Tories in 1997, and what happened yesterday; both lost the trust of
the public after economic turmoil, and both had spent too long
drinking their own Kool-Aid while neglecting their stated reason for
existing.

It is when parties deviate from their fundamental intellectual core
that they suffer the most. The most important example of this in the
current administration is public spending. Whilst tax cuts helped to
keep the American economy growing their pre-requisite – low public
spending – was ignored. It’s harder to demonise big government
liberals when you have spent eight years turning a healthy budget
surplus into a massive deficit, a deficit which represents a massive
tax burden on future generations in the form of interest payments to
Chinese bankers.

In Britain the ideological departure had serious underpinnings and
serious consequences. The pragmatic conservatism of the previous 150
years was eschewed in exchange for the dynamic monetarism,
privatisation and market liberalisation of the Thatcher
revolution. To succeed once more the GOP must rediscover its own
ideological core, an ideology that is found not in the
anti-intellectual city-dweller baiting of Sarah Palin but in
integrity in government, individual freedom and not just low taxes
but low spending.

It is difficult, as a small-government Libertarian conservative, to
find much of a silver lining in yesterday’s election; not only does it
bring us dangerously close to one-party rule – just two Senate votes,
at the time of writing, and that only if Senatorial filibuster rules
are not changed – but it seems destined to lead to yet more
government interventionism. About the only positive aspect of it that
I can find, is that it might represent the death knell of the
far-right, authoritarian “conservatives” that have monopolized the
GOP brand for too long.

The ‘Evangelical Right’ should have always been the party’s fringe,
not its core; by making it the latter, Republican leaders virtually
guaranteed yesterday’s outcome sooner or later. The far-right just
isn’t socially mainstream enough to form the core of a majority
political party. That the strategy worked for as long as it did is
remarkable, but – perhaps thankfully – it has found its limit.

The much-ballyhooed ‘silent majority’ was willing to nod along with
social authoritarians – men and women who seemed more interested in
what was going on in their neighbors’ bedrooms than in Wall Street
boardrooms – so long as the economy was humming along and we were
winning wars abroad. But once that ended, so too did the public’s
tolerance for politicians who had built their careers obsessing over
irrelevancies. And let’s be clear: to all but a hard core of
religious conservatives, when Wall Street is melting down, concerns
over fetuses and buggery are worse than irrelevant.

The question now is whether the Republican party will pull itself
together in time to save the country from sliding disastrously far to
the left. They have two years in which they must formulate a new
message, or at least rediscover an old message that they seem to have
forgotten, and take that message to the public, before mid-term
elections. I sincerely hope that they can do it, because as bad as
the two-party system is, a one-party system – which is what we’re
looking at if the Republican party doesn’t adopt a ‘big tent’ platform
very quickly – would be far worse.